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First they said they won't add generics. They violently defended that decision. Developers bent over backwards to make it work without generics. Some even wrote

First they said they won't add generics. They violently defended that decision. Developers bent over backwards to make it work without generics. Some even wrote long blog posts defending Rob Pike's decision. Some wrote posts arguing against it. Now the Golang team adds them. Why waste so much developer time? It's not a few months. It's several years. This industry is seriously a clown show tbh.

amazingamazing 2mo ago
What’s wrong with meeting demand?
- improgrammer007 2mo ago
  Nothing is wrong. What was wrong before when they vehemently argued against adding it? Is that design principle/core value lost now?
  - ninkendo 2mo ago
    Reminds me of when Apple finally moved the iPhone to USB-C… they defended lightning for the longest time, but then when when they finally did the switch, all I could think was “the last N years [0] of lightning accessories I’ve bought are now ewaste”… once it became clear USB-C was going to be the future, every year they weren’t using it was another year of future ewaste building up. Every year go didn’t have generics was another year of workarounds and tech debt building up that would have otherwise been able to be written the right way from the start. Unlike ewaste though, it’s probably impossible to quantify. [0] I’d probably peg N as the years between when they gave MacBooks USB-C ports for charging, up until the iPhone got them. It’s clear Apple knew they were gonna need to move to it eventually… every year in that period represents a year of lightning cables people bought that could have been still-useful USB-C cables today.
    - kokada 2mo ago
      Technical debt, sure. But you could argue the same for any new feature added to a programming language, without having X you will need to workaround with Y, generating technical debt. To be clear, I was one of those people that only started to use Go after generics. But for most of my projects, generics is less than 1% of the code base, so it is not like lack of generics was a huge issue. I think it is more of a problem for libraries in general.
  - amazingamazing 2mo ago
    It is not a monolith, maintainers change? Why does it matter so much to you anyway? You can choose not to use generics
saturn_vk 2mo ago
Violently?
- rapnie 2mo ago
  Too much. More like vehemently. Perhaps parent meant to say that.
  - improgrammer007 2mo ago
    Yes, just used the word for emphasis :-)
pphysch 2mo ago
At this point, the "damage" has been done and even skeptics of generics/iterators should applaud this proposal since it means burying some of that added complexity behind straightforward stdlib interfaces. Unless they are just here to complain, of course.
pstuart 2mo ago
Core members of the language team (Robert Griesemer and Ian Lance Taylor) argued for generics from the very beginning. The team resisted because they didn't know how to do it without sacrificing speed of compilation. Rob Pike did a lot of defensive work to deflect it but I'll quote him here on the issue when he said "There are no plans for generics. I said we're going to leave the language; we're done": "I meant there are no plans for generics. That's not the same as saying we plan not to do generics. It just means we don't have a plan." You take it as a conspiracy against developers when it's really a small team trying to find their way the best they can.
- improgrammer007 2mo ago
  It's an utter waste of time for developers, business, everyone. Millions of lines of Go code have been written without generics. Libraries have been written. Support, maintenance, cost, etc. This is why one shouldn't pick languages that regress in features from the get go. Now developers will waste time migrating the code to stdlib. This is not solving problems. This is doing tech for the sake of doing tech. Wasting everyone's time. Remember that code is not the deliverable.
  - pstuart 2mo ago
    I'm confused by what language regression you are referring to. > Now developers will waste time migrating the code to stdlib Why? If it works now it works. Refactoring tools exist, and LLMs make this trivial. You just seem to hate the language and everything about it, and that's your right but I think your arguments are specious and ignore that most language that go mainstream evolve and that comes with tradeoffs (python2 -> python3, rust in general, etc). And as far as deliverables go, the code is absolutely foundational to that and Go was made to be maintainable by codemonkeys such as myself. Anyway, the language and the changes noted in the OP apparently aren't for you and that's ok -- there's plenty of languages out there for everyone's taste.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
win311fwg 2mo ago
Huh? First they said they would: https://youtu.be/rKnDgT73v8s?t=3267 https://youtu.be/rKnDgT73v8s?t=3267 After a decade of nobody coming up with a solution that did turn to believing that Go would never be able to add generics. That is true. The air of defeat did become quite strong. But the Haskell guy did eventually came along to share his expertise and the rest is history.

amazingamazing 2mo ago

What’s wrong with meeting demand?

improgrammer007 2mo ago
Nothing is wrong. What was wrong before when they vehemently argued against adding it? Is that design principle/core value lost now?
- ninkendo 2mo ago
  Reminds me of when Apple finally moved the iPhone to USB-C… they defended lightning for the longest time, but then when when they finally did the switch, all I could think was “the last N years [0] of lightning accessories I’ve bought are now ewaste”… once it became clear USB-C was going to be the future, every year they weren’t using it was another year of future ewaste building up. Every year go didn’t have generics was another year of workarounds and tech debt building up that would have otherwise been able to be written the right way from the start. Unlike ewaste though, it’s probably impossible to quantify. [0] I’d probably peg N as the years between when they gave MacBooks USB-C ports for charging, up until the iPhone got them. It’s clear Apple knew they were gonna need to move to it eventually… every year in that period represents a year of lightning cables people bought that could have been still-useful USB-C cables today.
  - kokada 2mo ago
    Technical debt, sure. But you could argue the same for any new feature added to a programming language, without having X you will need to workaround with Y, generating technical debt. To be clear, I was one of those people that only started to use Go after generics. But for most of my projects, generics is less than 1% of the code base, so it is not like lack of generics was a huge issue. I think it is more of a problem for libraries in general.
- amazingamazing 2mo ago
  It is not a monolith, maintainers change? Why does it matter so much to you anyway? You can choose not to use generics

saturn_vk 2mo ago

Violently?

rapnie 2mo ago
Too much. More like vehemently. Perhaps parent meant to say that.
- improgrammer007 2mo ago
  Yes, just used the word for emphasis :-)

pphysch 2mo ago

At this point, the "damage" has been done and even skeptics of generics/iterators should applaud this proposal since it means burying some of that added complexity behind straightforward stdlib interfaces. Unless they are just here to complain, of course.

pstuart 2mo ago

Core members of the language team (Robert Griesemer and Ian Lance Taylor) argued for generics from the very beginning. The team resisted because they didn't know how to do it without sacrificing speed of compilation. Rob Pike did a lot of defensive work to deflect it but I'll quote him here on the issue when he said "There are no plans for generics. I said we're going to leave the language; we're done": "I meant there are no plans for generics. That's not the same as saying we plan not to do generics. It just means we don't have a plan." You take it as a conspiracy against developers when it's really a small team trying to find their way the best they can.

improgrammer007 2mo ago
It's an utter waste of time for developers, business, everyone. Millions of lines of Go code have been written without generics. Libraries have been written. Support, maintenance, cost, etc. This is why one shouldn't pick languages that regress in features from the get go. Now developers will waste time migrating the code to stdlib. This is not solving problems. This is doing tech for the sake of doing tech. Wasting everyone's time. Remember that code is not the deliverable.
- pstuart 2mo ago
  I'm confused by what language regression you are referring to. > Now developers will waste time migrating the code to stdlib Why? If it works now it works. Refactoring tools exist, and LLMs make this trivial. You just seem to hate the language and everything about it, and that's your right but I think your arguments are specious and ignore that most language that go mainstream evolve and that comes with tradeoffs (python2 -> python3, rust in general, etc). And as far as deliverables go, the code is absolutely foundational to that and Go was made to be maintainable by codemonkeys such as myself. Anyway, the language and the changes noted in the OP apparently aren't for you and that's ok -- there's plenty of languages out there for everyone's taste.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]

win311fwg 2mo ago

Huh? First they said they would: https://youtu.be/rKnDgT73v8s?t=3267 https://youtu.be/rKnDgT73v8s?t=3267 After a decade of nobody coming up with a solution that did turn to believing that Go would never be able to add generics. That is true. The air of defeat did become quite strong. But the Haskell guy did eventually came along to share his expertise and the rest is history.